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A medieval vampire woman teams up with a bunch of LOTR geeks and heads off to thwart the evil Ben Kingsley.

IS IT A GOOD MOVIE?

Sure, it's a good movie ... in lunatic craZYheAD Bizzaro World!!
My orignal thoughts on BLOODRAYNE were as follows (and after a second visit, they remain pretty much the same):

Uwe Boll is a filmmaker, and I use that noun lightly, who seems to revel in the ineptitude of his own movies, as if it's a badge of honor to be dismissed as "the world's worst working director, period." Flip to any random sequence of BLOODRAYNE and you'll see a film professor's most vibrant nightmare:

--Acting performances that seem absent and distracted at best; unintentionally hilarious at worst. (As one of the vampire slayers, Michael Madsen is so plainly contemptuous of the project that he delivers his babble in an ellipses-laden staccato. "But what ... about ... the head ... vampire?") From Ms. Loken's blank (but beautiful) visage to the perpetually confused eyebrows of Mr. Madsen, and including all the set-chomping cameos from the likes of Billy Zane, Udo Kier, and Ben Kingsley... I mean, this is a movie that not only expects Michelle Rodriguez to speak in an Olde Englishe accente, but also for the viewer to refrain from laughing its collective head off while it flops out of the speakers. Frankly I don't see how any working actor could look at a Uwe Boll production and not see the words "kiss of death" glowing over their career in bright green neon.

--Costumes, props, and sets that look like they fell off the back of a truck, and I mean a truck that was somehow hovering 1,000 feet in the air. The swords look like foil-wrapped cardboard, the wardrobe looks like a clearance sale at the Halloween Adventure shop, and the flimsy sets look they were recycled from something like THE BEASTMASTER.

--An unrelentingly tone-deaf musical score that has perhaps eleven notes, four melodies, and three instruments. In a better film, this score would be called bland & intrusive. In BLOODRAYNE, it seems to fit just perfectly.

--A narrative that seems enjoyably simple on paper, but in the hands of this crap-master, turns out to be more convoluted than M.C. Escher's worst pepperoni-induced nightmare. You'd think that "good guys want to kill head vampire" would be a relatively easy tale to tell, so explain to me why I found the flick harder to follow that MULHOLLAND DRIVE on multiple clicks of the FF button.

--Editorial choices that make MOULIN ROUGE look like the opening sequence from TOUCH OF EVIL. OK, we all know that folks like Michelle Rodriguez, Michael Madsen, and Ben Kingsley are not going to learn any actual swordplay for a paycheck this chintzy, but even a half-blind nine-year-old could tell you how inept the editing in this flick is. The action scenes never/stop/cutting/to/alternate/shots; even in the most basic action scenes (including one where Raingirl simply swings her swords around) there are about 32 cuts too many. Woody Allen has directed better action scenes than those found in BLOODRAYNE.

And on and on it goes... Frankly I think that once Uwe Boll churns out a few more video game movies, a smart professor will start offering his body of work as an elective. Tell me you wouldn't want to spend a semester studying movies this bad, so they can help you learn what to avoid when you film your next vampire action period piece in Romania.

THE EXTRAS

First up is an audio commentary with producer Shawn Williamson, first assistant director Brian Knight, actors Kristanna Loken & Will Sanderson, and The Man himself: Mr. Uwe Boll. The commentary's actually quite a small bit of fun, with Boll deluding himself non-stop throughout the process while Williamson and Knight seem to be poking some fun at their auteur. Hehe. Listening to Boll knock his naysayers and bash movies like ELEKTRA, heh, it just never gets old.

You'll also find a five-minute CGI breakdown section, a 48-minute(!) Dinner with Uwe Boll, which is an airy interview/meal between Boll and a pair of IGN writers (that would have been a WHOLE lot better had it been edited down to a workable length), a few storyboards, and the original theatrical trailer.

As a bonus (ok, as a main selling point), the DVD comes packaged with a complete version of BLOODRAYNE 2, which is a PC video game and NOT a movie. Whew.

FINAL DIAGNOSIS

So while it's true that BLOODRAYNE is marginally better than Uwe Boll's previous efforts, that's kind of like saying normal poop is marginally easier to clean up than diarrhea poop.